


in search of a story that's never been known

by friendly_ficus



Series: from a much outdated style [7]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: AU where they're basically gods, Gen, vague nods to canon and even vaguer nods to d&d
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23727631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: The library is godless in the most literal sense.Or: There are no easy answers.
Series: from a much outdated style [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/907551
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44





	in search of a story that's never been known

**Author's Note:**

> *cr cast voice*: IT'S BEEN A WHILE

“It can’t be this easy,” Keyleth says. “Breaking into the house — plane — library,  _ whatever  _ of a goddess  _ cannot _ be this easy. Why hasn’t everyone already done it?”

“Lack of inspiration, I suppose.” Percy smiles faintly as he inspects the glyphs Scanlan’s scattered across the walls. “It seems we’re a... unique group.”

This tavern room in Kraghammer really isn’t built to hold seven people, especially if one of those people is the size of Grog, but everyone’s packed in anyway. Scanlan had asked them to move to specific spots, then asked them to move the furniture to different spots, then made a few chalk markings on the floor. Then he’d asked them to move to new spots. Then he’d asked Grog to just put the bed and side table out in the hallway. They were in the way. Then he’d drawn a circle on the floor, eyes hazing over with purple light as he  **hummed.**

And when he hummed, the room changed. It was a difficult effect to describe; the sound echoed in the enclosed space and warped back around, nearly physical. It shimmered like heat in the air, wavering notes and sweeping scales. And it picked up the chalk from the circle, and plucked a piece of it from Scanlan’s hand, and floated through the room. The symbols the song drew on the walls were... confusing. 

They were nonsense, if Percy was being honest. It didn’t even seem to be a language, just a collection of lines and dots with the occasional letter peppered in for show. But the light had faded from Scanlan’s eyes and he, at least, seemed satisfied with the results. 

“Didn’t seem simple to me,” Grog adds to the conversation. “Seemed pretty intense.”

Where he’s speaking to the twins, having Vex stand  _ there  _ and Vax  _ there _ as a mirror, Scanlan sways in a subtle back-and-forth pattern. He turns to face the rest of them with a flourish.

“Places, people, just like we discussed. We’ve got one shot to do this right, I think. Or, we’ll all be flung to distant planes and never be heard from again. Both interesting possibilities.” 

They move, six specific points with him at the center, as Scanlan digs a slim volume of limericks out of his bag. When they stand in the right spots something  **clicks** in his ears, the distinct tap-tap-tap of a conductor on a music stand, and anticipation twitches his fingers. 

(It’s a ritual he’s making up as he goes, a song he doesn’t know the tune of—it’s Scanlan, reaching out, breaking down Ioun’s door. It’s Scanlan, remembering that terrible feeling of running into a wall trying to reach her. It’s Scanlan with six other people he can count on and a world of people depending on them, crying out for answers. It’s a chance.)

In the center of the room, Scanlan clears his throat and adds his voice to the music of the planes themselves.

“Take a look,” Scanlan **sings,** eyes bright, “it’s in a book, Ioun’s Library...” 

There’s the sound of fluttering pages and a shudder runs through the seven of them as his voice multiplies, harmonizes with itself, becomes a choir. The book of limericks yanks out of his hands, hovers in the air with the chalk symbols glowing on the walls. They glow brighter and the book opens, shuts, turns inside-out in some awful miracle of paper and ink and binding.

The pages flutter and reality  _ groans _ and the room is filled with light, blinding. There is, in the suspended moment where they are nowhere and can see nothing but blank, uncaring light, the sound of a door creaking open.

Then the light clears and it’s just the seven of them, staring at each other in the middle of bookshelves that loom above, vast and silent.

It doesn’t feel like a library at all, not really. 

It feels like a tomb.

\---

The first thing Scanlan notices is the darkness, the smell of dust in the air—no, that isn’t right. The first thing Scanlan notices is the silence. There’s something horrific about it, that silence. There should be movement here, spirits bobbing along and ordering the shelves, a few visitors from various corners of the planes bent over tomes at study tables. There should be breath, a subtle shifting of the air itself in response to Ioun’s presence. There should be anything at all, beyond the dim, dusty shelves. 

(He’d thought, well. He’d hoped—there had been a moment when the book had torn itself apart, where he’d thought,  _ She’s going to be there, we’ll figure it out together. _

Seems stupid now, to think something like that. They should be so lucky.)

He knows there’s a bookshelf somewhere in here, chained shut and locked and difficult to look at without getting a headache. In the early days, when he haunted the library more often than not, he’d known exactly where it was. It, something about it was. Was. It felt dangerous to be near it, and Ioun had encouraged him not to give it another thought. 

It’s been  _ years  _ since then, and the high ceilings and empty arches of the place seem strange and unfamiliar without the goddess there to light them.

“Hey,” Pike says softly, armor clanking as she walks to his side. “You okay?”

He nods, swallows and tries to speak but finds he doesn’t know what to say. 

(He’d been hoping Ioun would be here for another reason, to be honest; she has these scars on her chest, this old, unhealing wound. And Pike... Pike hasn’t complained, but he’s seen her holding back a wince a few times. She’s not half the liar he is; he can tell she’s hiding something painful.)

“So!” Keyleth says with a forced kind of positivity, refusing to frown even as her exclamation echoes through the wide space between bookshelves they’ve landed in. “Where do we find the un-banishing section?”

“About that...”

\---

“You  _ don’t know where it is?”  _ Percy hisses. It’s kind of funny, honestly, in a way that Scanlan’s sure is meant to be intimidating. He does this thing where he kind of  _ looms  _ over you and his glasses catch a reflection, gleam in contrast with the shadows all around him.

“Hey. That just means we’ve gotta find it.” Grog claps a hand on his back that sends him stumbling a step forward, Scanlan jumping out of the way. The tension of the moment breaks cleanly, any thought of blaming Scanlan set aside for the time being. 

“How would we do that?” Keyleth asks, tilting her head to the side, reaching a hand out to touch one of the towering bookshelves. “I can talk to plants, but they have to be, y’know. Living.”

“We’ll have to split up,” Vex’ahlia starts walking towards the end of the row of shelves. “We’ll cover more ground that way.”

Vax lets out a huff and vanishes—or moves very quickly? Scanlan isn’t really sure what his whole deal is—reappearing at his sister’s side. 

“We should split up into  _ groups,”  _ he stresses, reaching out to tug at her braid. “No point to going along alone, if we’re just going to get lost. We should get lost  _ together.” _

“Fine,” she says. “Dibs on going with Scanlan.”

“What?” Vax sounds like he’s pouting; the remaining five of them move closer, to see the twins better in the dim light. It’s nowhere near as dark as the Underdark, of course, but a lamp wouldn’t go amiss. 

“Oh for—of  _ course  _ we’re going together. I just think we should go together with Scanlan; he’s been here before, and I’m very good with direction. We’ll have a pretty good chance at finding this thing.”

“If we’re picking teams, I want Keyleth,” Pike pipes up, looking meaningfully at Grog.

“Fine,” he groans, “I’ll look after Glasses.”

So they split up, each group walking in a different direction through the vast, silent space.

\---

“Why did you pick me?” Keyleth asks quietly, as she and Pike wander through the cool, twisting shelves. “Not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of...”

“A mess right now? Yeah, I noticed.” Pike sounds supremely unconcerned with it. 

“So, why’d you pick me?”

Pike stops walking, turns to meet her eyes. “You’re pretty strong and you’re nice. Lots of people are nice when they’re not actively in pain, y’know; if I ruled them all out as friends just because they were hurting, I wouldn’t end up with many friends.”

Keyleth clenches her hand around her staff. Pyrah, in her heart, burns. 

“I don’t know, I don’t know that I’m not in pain,” she says carefully.

“I know.”

“You do?”

“You  _ are  _ in pain. What happened is awful. It’s gonna keep being awful. It might keep being awful once we work all this out.” Pike reaches out and takes Keyleth’s hand, her own somehow warm through her gauntlet. “It will always be a tragedy, Keyleth. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you, that I don’t think we can be friends. I want us to work together, I want all of us to work together, but more than that I want us to be friends. And friends help each other.”

Keyleth finds herself smiling a little, blinking back tears. “Cool,” she blurts.

They turn to continue looking for... for  _ something  _ that has to do with something, making it to a fork in the shelves. There’s a little shift in the air, like a sigh. And it becomes colder, abruptly.

Keyleth shivers, sees Pike do the same out of the corner of her eye.  _ Strange,  _ she thinks, but her instincts are prickling.

(They say she climbs a mountain every winter, to bring Spring through the curtain of the clouds. Keyleth, blazing and grieving and angry enough to spit sparks, knows a thing or two about cold.)

A flame curls across one of her hands, and as she holds it up to light the intersection in the shelves a blast of freezing wind blows it out like a candle.

There’s a beat where she looks at Pike and Pike looks back at her, before they both turn to go directly into the wind.

\---

They find the bookshelf and work it open, Scanlan and the twins and a little twist of fate.

It’s a longer search than that, of course, and there are many twists and turns and a couple good conversations—turns out ol’ frowns-a-lot has a sense of humor under all those feathers after all, much to Scanlan’s happiness—but there’s this little sense of dread in the back of Scanlan’s mind the whole time that acts as a pretty good indicator that they’re going in the right direction. 

“We’ll go where it feels worse,” he proposes at the beginning of their search, and the twins agree.

The locked shelf is intimidating in exactly the way Percy hadn’t managed to be, earlier. It looms and the shadows around it seem darker than they should, even in this low light. It’s difficult to see through them, to the chains. The chains themselves are unpleasant to touch, sort of buzzing against all of their hands like angry wasps. Not stinging, but the  _ you are too close  _ vibe is definitely there. 

Vax reaches out first, and Scanlan catches a glimpse of an odd scar on his hand, like someone had wrapped a wire around his fingers a few times and superheated it. That’s a scar with a story if he’s ever seen one. Anyway, Vax reaches out and gathers up the shadows like they’re unruly kittens, herding them closer to him so the other two can get a decent look at the lock and the chains and the contents of the bookshelf.

(One curls up under his hand, almost alive rather than the result of accumulated secrets and a whole lot of warding like he knows it is. He doesn’t know if they’d lash out at the others, he’s not sure if they have claws. They twist a little in his grasp, like they’re playing, and he finds himself suppressing a laugh.  _ This is a very serious situation,  _ he thinks, as a shadow pokes his cheek.  _ I am doing a very serious thing here.) _

Scanlan hefts a length of the chain out of the way, not quite looking at it straight-on. Even with that, he feels the beginning of a headache stirring. 

But he holds it up anyway and Vex comes forward with an ordinary lockpick, works at the lock for a long few minutes as he hums softly. It comes open with a  _ click  _ that echoes through the quiet.

Scanlan knows what book it is. He doesn’t know how he knows what book it is, but when he reaches in to pick up the battered book he knows it’s the right one. He’s certain of it.

Vex gives him a nod and re-locks the lock, and Vax lets the shadows go to swarm back up over the bookcase. 

They crack it open at a desk, fiddling with the nearby lamp until they’ve coaxed it into igniting. It makes a little puddle of light in the quiet darkness and the three of them crowd around the book, flip through the pages trying to figure out what’s happened, what it all means. It’s not that they want to do it without the others—it’s just that it’s here, right now, and they’re here right now. Why  _ not  _ try to understand it?

“So if I’ve got this right,” Vax says, rubbing at his eyes. “And there’s definitely a possibility that I  _ haven’t,  _ since none of us are experts in this, but if I’ve got this right, something’s wrong with the Divine Gate.”

“Like the ‘hinges’ are missing,” Vex offers, “so it’s not opening like it should. But I thought it doesn’t open at all, ever—isn’t it meant to be like a net? Things get through it, but it’s not actually a door.”

“Right,” Scanlan agrees. “From what I know it’s like a bad fence. The problem is that right now,  _ nothing  _ can get through it, so it’s more like a wall.”

“A holy wall, where we want a holey wall,” Vax is smiling and his sister groans as Scanlan laughs at the joke.

“All our lives,” she tells the gnome, “and he still makes the same kind of joke. I suffer, do you understand?”

“Aw, you love me, Stubby,” he teases, and she doesn’t deny it.

“So,” Vex says, bringing them back on track, “there’s a wall keeping the gods away, even from their... houses? This is like Ioun’s house, isn’t it?”

Scanlan nods. “We’re gonna need something to poke holes in it somehow, according to the book. A very strong knife; got anything like that?” he asks, looking at Vax, who shakes his head.

But Scanlan sees a flash of discomfort cross Vex’s face, turns to face her when there’s a sudden blast of cold air that extinguishes their lamp, leaving them in near-darkness once more. 

There’s an echo of what’s becoming a familiar roar, and beneath it Grog bellows in rage. Vax doesn’t even wait to be asked, reaching across the table to grab his sister’s wrist and Scanlan’s shoulder as the gnome scoops up the book. 

The shadows, earlier so playful, respond to his call like hunting hounds—he drags them all through the darkness until they’re at the big guy’s side.

\---

“Go on ahead, Grog,” Percy says, strangled. He’s staring at a book, unmoving. “We must be close to  _ something,  _ after all.”

“You okay?”

“Yes, yes,” he says, not even really noticing the sudden drop in temperature. He’s looking at the slim volume, nestled among what must be millions; the chance that he’d find this one is astronomical. 

“I dunno about this—”

“Just  _ go,”  _ Percy snarls, still not turning to look at him. Grog shrugs, and turns to leave. 

“Could’ve just asked for some privacy,” he grumbles, reaching the end of the row and looking down the long aisle. This part of the library seems more like a grid, which is good, because it’d been confusing as fuck for a good hour there.

In the distance, he can hear the scraping, clanking footsteps that signal his buddy.

But that’s in the distance. Caught, transfixed in front of a bookshelf, Percy takes in the pale blue spine, the name inscribed in gold.  _ Johanna de Klossowski,  _ it reads, and there’s a tiny crest at the base. It’s his mother’s crest, he knows it. He remembers the ring on her finger.

They’d never talked much about religion, when she’d been alive. They couldn’t talk about anything now.

It’s cold enough now that his breath is steaming, fogging up his glasses every few exhales. Cold enough that his fingers are almost numb—

Percy reaches up, not sure if it will be a record of her life or something more concrete, something he can talk to; there is not a thought in his head of their goal in coming here, not anymore. Well there is a thought:  _ That doesn’t matter anymore. That doesn’t matter like my family, like  _ this  _ does. _

There’s a tremendous  **_crack_ ** of the floor tiles behind him, and the ground shakes awfully, shelves creaking and threatening to fall. He whirls, reaches for Bad News but his hands are so cold, they’re slow to move—

There’s a rush of freezing air, an absolute wall of cold slamming into him. Percy doesn’t hear the roar break the quiet of the library, doesn’t see the gleaming claws break their way through the floor in some parody of an animal clawing its way out of a den. 

When Grog comes skidding back around the corner, Pike and Keyleth close behind, the first thing he sees is Percy and all the books behind him encased in a sheet of ice.

**“Little things,”** the ice dragon rumbles.  **“I’m** **_hungry.”_ **

\---

Keyleth is already sculpting a spell when the other three come stumbling out of a shadow, the magic so hot it cracks the air around them. Her eyes are glowing a bright, light green and she  _ pushes  _ her hands out at the dragon, a firestorm surging forth at her call.

Scanlan, quicker than he’s ever managed before, rushes through the first three lines of an epic poem about a siege; a shining wall raises up against the bookshelves, protecting them as best he can. It won’t hold forever, he knows. It can’t. But he can make it work right  _ now,  _ and that’s what counts. Grog rushes past him, axe up and swinging.

_ “How did it get in here?”  _ Vex shouts above the grinding ice and roaring, but no one can answer her.  _ What the fuck,  _ she thinks, ducking behind the edge of a returns cart and coming up to fire two arrows that crackle with lightning.  _ Dragon’s aren’t fucking able to  _ do  _ that. _

Grog is trading blows with the dragon as Keyleth hurls another fireball at it, Vax appearing and disappearing from moment to moment to dig his daggers into the ice. None of it is doing much, Pike notes distantly, nothing but the fire seems to have much effect. She notes it distantly, of course, because she’s currently rushing down the now very narrow hallway to get to Percy’s frozen side. 

“Hi,” she whispers to the slab of ice, “hi.” 

Pike shuts her eyes, blocks out the sound of the battle for a moment, blocks out everything but the way it had felt to touch his hand in the tunnel in the Underdark, everything but the way it feels to reach for the well of power that is  _ hers,  _ that surges up at her call. Sarenrae can’t hear her right now, through no fault of either of them. But Pike has healed when her god isn’t listening before.

When she opens her eyes, the reflection in the ice is almost blinding as she glows a gold so pale it’s almost white. She puts her hand forward and there’s a loud  _ crack,  _ what she knows is the first of many. 

It isn’t  _ right  _ that Percy is frozen here when he’s trying so hard to help them. It isn’t fair. 

**“Come back to us,”** Pike orders, and there are a hundred cracks in the ice, all at once, that shudder and  _ shatter. _

Percy falls and she catches him before he hits the ground, his skin strange and pale and freezing cold; when he opens his eyes they’re a solid wash of dark blue, almost black. He reaches for the gun on his back, not even shaking. Pike helps him into standing up and he raises the rifle and—she holds her breath—fires it through the terrific storm of snow and steam. She hears the slam of the impact and knows he got the shot right.

Breathing hard, he blinks and his eyes clear; he looks at her and lowers the gun, a satisfied little smirk on his face. “Had to get it back for the whole,” he offers, nodding at the pile of pulverized ice she’s made.

“Right,” she says, turning to swing her mace at a giant hailstone when it soars in their direction. “I get it.”

_ “Hey!”  _ Vex shouts,  _ “Great job, but it’s a little early to be patting ourselves on the back here!” _

She ducks back behind the cart, only for it to be obliterated by the stomp of a giant draconic foot. Rolling back from the shrapnel, she comes up firing arrow after arrow after arrow. 

After what feels like a long time, Grog is thrown back and thuds against the weird purple wall Scanlan’s made, sliding down to be somewhat next to Keyleth.

“Hey,” he says between fireballs, “not sure how long we’re gonna manage this. It’s going pretty good right now, but Glasses and Scanlan aren’t looking so good.”

“They’re hurt?” she gasps, the light in her eyes clearing for a moment as she focuses on him. 

“Eh, could be worse. But we’d better finish this up pretty quick—you got something for that?”

**“Yes,”** she says, meaning,  _ I’ve got something, yes I’ve got something, they say I climb a mountain every year to kill winter, you know. Seems like they’ve been saying that for a lot longer than I’ve been alive.  _

Keyleth starts moving forward, the frost that tries to form on her skin steaming away. She’s carrying something, cupped in her hands, and as she moves past Grog it gets a little harder to breathe as the air gets thin. He sees it there, in the cage of her fingers, a spark that’s shining brighter and brighter, like she’s caught a piece of the sun.

She keeps running down the hallway, Vax blurring along the edges of her path as he stabs the claws that get too close. He doesn’t pause, never stops moving, but in the reflection of his daggers he sees her glowing. In her hands, the glowing thing is changing, twisting in on itself.

It’s getting a little harder to breathe for all of them now, and it’s getting  _ warmer  _ which means it’s getting humid as the ice melts. The light in her hands is as big as an apple, now. The dragon is changing tactics, lashing out more physically but Grog and Pike join Vax in keeping it off Keyleth, Vex and Percy continuing to chip at it from a distance. Scanlan, where he’s still reciting verse, is swaying with exhaustion.

Keyleth gets close enough to feel the dragon’s breath, bitter and cold as it towers above her. It opens its mouth—a thousand glittering teeth of ice come rushing at her from above as it moves to eat her, to consume her, to kill her in the way that winter kills—and she raises up the light in her hands like a supplicant. 

It  _ beams  _ out from her, heat and fire like the sun itself, like the first light after a storm. Keyleth pours herself into it, her rage and sorrow and defiance, her will to keep fighting; where it hits the dragon the ice  _ boils on contact.  _

The dragon lets out a terrible scream, worse than a roar, caught up between pain and the frenzy of it, and then it is silent. It falls to the ground like a mountain crashing down, headless but for a melting lower jaw.

There’s a moment where the only sound is all of them breathing, when Scanlan lets go of his spell and the barriers between them and the books fades away. Pike and Keyleth turn to where Percy slumps against a shelf, shivering at last. Grog follows them, best suited to move the shitload of snow that’s everywhere right now if they need to.

“I know about a knife,” Vex declares, eyes a little wild. “I know about—” 

She breaks off, breathing crossing the line into hyperventilating. Her brother is at her side a moment later, putting his arm around her and murmuring something low.

_ Well, fuck,  _ Scanlan thinks, watching the two of them.  _ Hope there’s some luck left in us; we’re gonna need it. _

\---

"We don't have to talk about it now," her brother says in a voice that's low and just for her to hear. "We can go right now. We can figure it out ourselves. I can take us away from here.”

Vex breaks out of his cautious hold, whirls to face him with a cornered-animal quickness. “We  _ can’t,”  _ she manages, almost a sob. It’s too much, it’s something she never wanted to touch again but she has to, she  _ has  _ to—there’s a quiet footstep to her left and she turns to see Scanlan walking up to them.

He shakes his head, agreeing with her. “I've got a good ear for secrets, part of what makes me so charming. You've got a big one, Vex Dragonslayer.”

"This can wait," Vax spits, volume slowly increasing, "Can't you see that she's upset—"

"No it can't, we  _ need to know—" _

"Don't try to tell me what we need to do. You've got no idea, just like the rest of us. If my sister says she needs time then she'll  _ have  _ it—"

"He's right." Her own voice feels strange in her mouth, wind moving through different trees. Vax starts to reassure her but she raises a hand for silence and he falls back. "Even if it's happening slowly, even if we kill every dragon, the world is still falling apart.  _ We can't wait." _

(She pauses a moment, takes the situation in and takes her brother’s hand. Deep breaths, now. It’s an old trail ripe for retreading, an old wound begging for lancing. She reaches up with her other hand and holds her necklace, the weight reminding her that Trinket's always going to be there, that she’s never going to be alone.) 

Vex looks up, looks over and meets Scanlan's eyes and takes in the lack of levity. "I know about a knife," she repeats.

“Grand,” Percy’s voice floats over to them, a little bit of a wheeze in it. Grog’s supporting him, not quite carrying but definitely taking on a portion of his weight as they cross the cracked tiles to join the conversation. And there’s Pike and Keyleth as well. 

“It was mine,” Vex says. “It was mine but I left it behind, I left it there and I never went back.”

“What are you talking about, Stubby, where’s this knife?” She’s holding his hand but he’s looking at her strangely, all worry and incomprehension. She hates it, she hates how he’s looking at her, hates that she has to rip open an old scar, even if it’s for the world.

“Where rivers aren’t rivers,” she starts, and Percy jerks as a realization hits him, as he remembers her taking them to Emon. “Where a tree isn’t just a tree. The Feywild, where the truth is never the whole story.”

Vex’ahlia is staring into the distance, a void bubbling up in her chest, the taste of rotting plants and muck in the back of her teeth. It makes her wild and desperate and Percy sees it in her face, the whisper of madness. Her brother sees it too.

“We have to go get it,” Vex says bleakly. “We have to go get it.”

“We’re not going  _ anywhere  _ for at least another hour,” Pike says firmly. “We just fought our second dragon this week; I am  _ making sure  _ we’re all okay before we go anywhere.”

“Tell me,” her brother begs her, “tell me why you’re so afraid.”

So over the next two hours, as Pike checks them over and everyone shovels snow, she does.

\---

When is a tree not a tree, when is a book not a book, when is the shade not the shade—in the shadow of one colossal shelf, Vex’ahlia closes her eyes and  **_inhales,_ ** eyes twilight blue. The scenery around the group  _ twists  _ strangely and a strange birdsong filters through; the other members of the party breathe in unfamiliar scents, and something draws tight in Vex’ahlia’s shoulders. 

Her brother won’t look at her.

**Author's Note:**

> title for this fic comes from 'Three Hours' by Nick Drake  
> hi! it’s been a while! it might be a while again! i truly do not know, but i wrote this installment over a night where i wasn’t sleeping this week and i thought i should share it! Vex interlude is next.  
> i understand that it’s been a really long time since i updated this series, so it might not be interesting anymore, but if you’re sticking with it, welcome back! if it’s your first time reading this and you’re confused at the shift in writing style and my discovery of the em dash, welcome! i started this series when i was at a very different place as a writer and i know my style has changed, but i hope it’s still fun to read!  
> i’m making a couple changes going forward that i think will help with clarity; the whole “something happens when they say their names” thing isn’t going to happen every time, because it was just a little tedious to write and i don’t think it was adding anything more to the story. it might reappear at Narratively Satisfying moments.  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think! :)


End file.
